How Do I Keep Loneliness From Ruining My Love Life?

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I recently hit 30, and am in the middle of trying to turn my life around after a pretty rough decade. While going into the details wouldn’t be appropriate (or time efficient), the SparkNotes is something like this: I went through college without making any real friends or career prospects, finishing in 2015. My college social life got off to a rough start caused in part by a rocky breakup the year prior and subsequent estrangement from some of my closest friends, and it felt like I was never quite able to fully recover. I spent several years after school with pretty significant depression, trying to keep my life moving forward and get across the hump, but it never really ended, just stretching endlessly on, regardless of what I tried to do.

This came to a head in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and amidst all the world’s talking about what an unprecedented effect it had on their lives, I came to the stark realization that the struggle and social isolation that was suddenly thrust onto so many others was how I’d already been living my life for years, with no end in sight. I hit my limit, and with the help of family and some therapy, made the decision to pack up and move across the country to go back to school for what I really wanted to do. I’m now several years in, and things have really been looking up, both in terms of my career prospects and having people in my life who share my interests and passions.

HOWEVER, despite all the great success I’ve had in the past few years, I still feel just as stuck as I ever was when it comes to my love life, and it feels just as hopeless now as it did back when I was miserable and working a job I hated. I haven’t had a relationship since I was 17, and I haven’t been able to get so much as a single date in all the time since. There are certainly some extenuating circumstances, such as the fact that I’m going into a very male-dominated field, the vast majority of my social circle is 7 to 10 years younger than me, and I don’t have the time or vehicular freedom to go out freely; but I have trouble shaking the feeling that even if those barriers were removed, I still wouldn’t be able to find success with my love life. I can’t help but feel that there are things that kept me from deeper social connection during the last 10 years that are still present in my life, despite having found a much healthier place in other areas.

One of the consistent things I feel stuck on that prevents me from offering myself more opportunities is that I really don’t feel free to share my feelings (and thereby my unhappiness) with the people in my life, and letting them know that I struggle with loneliness. The aftermath of my previous relationships involved a lot of trauma-dumping, and the subsequent inability to return to any state of normalcy in our friendship, and whether it’s true or not, I feel that my wanting to talk about these feelings led to the loss of those friendships. I have a tendency to see the sharing of my sadness and struggles as an unhealthy habit that pushes people away from me. In the years since, however, it sometimes feels like my reluctance to be open with my feelings leads to a lack of deeper social connection, having friends that I get along with, but who don’t necessarily even know that I’m single, much less that I care about it, and MUCH much less the extent to which I find it extremely painful and lonely.

At risk of over-simplifying (which I have a tendency to do in writing), this leaves me with two opposing forces: One tells me that I need to just stop worrying about the whole thing, and that indulging in the desire to continually re-tread the same feelings and share that sadness is unhealthy and puts me in a bad place. The other is feeling that I really struggle finding satisfaction with the relationships I do have, and finding it impossible to make myself open to possible connection when it feels so taboo to be honest about how lonely and upset I am. I’ve turned this whole dilemma over and over so many times for the past decade that I just don’t know what to think anymore, which leaves me in the spot I’ve always been in: Safe, but unsatisfied, and unsure if the current road has any end in sight.

In summary, Dr. NerdLove, How do I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when I’ve dropped them in the past and experienced the fallout? As I’ve begun rebuilding my life, how can I make sure I leave room for the emotional closeness I’ve denied myself for so long?

Regards,

-Overthinking and Overwhelmed

Let’s start with something simple, OaO: you’re not alone in the intense loneliness. It’s hard to read the news or browse social media without seeing a steady stream of pieces about the loneliness epidemic that people – men, especially – are experiencing. It had been on the rise since before the pandemic and the lockdowns exacerbated things. So I suspect more people than you realize could relate to that feeling.

But there’s asking someone to relate and then there’s trauma-dumping all over someone.

Before we get to that, though, let’s focus on a different aspect of the issue: you’re putting up barriers between yourself and solving the problem of your loneliness and love life before you even attempt to solve it. Like a lot of folks who’ve written in, you’ve decided that you’ve failed before you’ve so much as set foot out the door. 

For example: there’s a difference between “extenuating circumstances” and listing a bunch of reasons why you shouldn’t even bother to try. And honestly, “extenuating circumstances” isn’t even the term you should be using. Extenuating circumstances implies that these are reasons why you shouldn’t be held fully responsible or that the context of the situation means that your actions should be seen in a different light. That, in turn, implies that you’re somehow being blamed for not having a relationship – as though not having dated for a long time is a sin or a crime as opposed to just “a thing I haven’t done in a while”. That suggests that you’ve decided that you’ve failed before you’ve so much as set foot out the door, and a not helpful one at that.

When you’re treating not having been on dates or not having had a relationship in a while as a moral failing, you end up putting excessive and unnecessary pressure on yourself. When you’ve framed situations like this as some sort of failure as a person, you’ve created a scenario where you have to be “perfect” or get unreasonable results in order to overcome the supposed deficits that’ve kept you single. You have set things up so that in your head, you aren’t just trying to connect with someone, you’re coming to any interaction with a negative balance that you have to compensate for just to get to a neutral reception, never mind a date. So now, instead of being in the moment and focusing on connecting with someone and getting to know them, you’re going to be focused on needing to do everything perfectly or else you won’t even get to the point where your presence isn’t an active insult to them. So you’re not going to actually be paying attention to them, getting to know them or even determining if they’re the right person for you, you’re going to be thinking about what to say next, how to say it and watching every micro-expression to determine how you’re doing.

And since you’ll be expecting a negative response – after all, they can surely detect that decades-long gap – you’ll see them all over the place. Will they actually be there? Probably not. But our attitudes and expectations are the filter through which we see the world, and so you will interpret things in the worst possible way and dismiss anything that suggests you’re doing better than you thought.

This ends up creating a self-reinforcing cycle. You go in expecting failure, you start looking for signs of failure and you’ll most likely end up rejecting yourself or presenting yourself in such a way that all that ensure you get rejected, thus confirming that failure is all you can expect.

If you want to actually start having success, you have to break this cycle and the first step is to stop assuming that you’ve failed before you even began.

This is why that list of “extenuating circumstances” sound a lot more like “reasons to not bother trying”. You’ve rejected yourself before you even talked to someone because you won’t accept the possibility of success, just varying degrees of failure.

Breaking this cycle is going to depend on an important factor: assuming that maybe, just maybe you’re wrong. You’re wrong about not being able to meet people, that you’re wrong about not being able to get around as freely as others, that you’re wrong about the limitations you have. Work and your friends’ ages aren’t the hard boundaries of your life, nor are they the only ways you can meet people. They’re frequently the most convenient, but not the only way.

If you want to start having more success at meeting people, you have to start looking at these supposed limitations as challenges at worst, not impossibilities. And that’s assuming that you’re even correct in the first place. People can and do date while also having to rely on public transport after all – not just in Chicago or New York or San Francisco and the like. If you want to find love, you have to be willing to face challenges and work to overcome them, not look at them and say “welp, no point in even trying I guess”.  

But let’s zero back onto the whole “trauma dumping” thing, the vulnerability and the feeling that you’re still stuck in the same place, mentally.

We’ll start with what trauma dumping is. Trauma dumping isn’t venting or going on an occasional rant because something’s been bugging you and you need to let it out. Venting is opening up and expressing yourself in a one-sided manner in a way that respects the time, feelings and boundaries of the listener. Trauma dumping, on the other hand, is dropping all of those feelings and traumatic events on another person with no consideration for their feelings or needs or even whether they were ready to hear all of that.

That sort of behavior is inconsiderate to others and it runs the risk of causing its own problems for the other person, especially if they weren’t ready or expecting all of that. Being on the receiving end of the Firehose of Feelings can be a lot. And if it’s a regular occurrence with someone… well, there comes a point where folks are going to cut ties, if only for their own emotional security.

You say that you’re afraid to open up and be vulnerable about your loneliness because of the way things went with your friends post break-up  Part of the issue here is that you seem to be self-aware enough to know that you had been trauma dumping… but somehow that doesn’t translate to knowing or being able to not do that. That’s something I think you need to dig into.

It’s entirely possible to open up to people and express that it’s frustrating being single and that dating can be a nightmare without backing up The Trauma Truck and pouring everything out on them. You don’t have to shotgun every single feeling and thought and disappointment when you discuss the topic. You can just say “this shit sucks and I hate it” without then giving a blow by blow, play by play of every single feel and anxiety. If that requires a superhuman level of control form you, then that’s the bigger issue at hand.  

There’s also the desire to want to keep chewing over these feelings over and over again. That, to me, sounds like things aren’t feeling resolved in some way, shape or form and you’re looking for an answer or a way to at least deal with them.  Either they’re unresolved, or there’s something you’re getting out of this psychic self-harm you keep doing to yourself. 

That actually leads me to my next point and an important question for you to answer: what, precisely, are you hoping to gain from opening up about your loneliness? Are you hoping for understanding? Acknowledgement? For commiseration and solidarity? Or are you hoping for someone to have an answer for you? There’s a difference between needing to express some feelings you’ve been repressing or holding back and turning on the fire hose in hopes that someone will solve the problem for you or – at the very least – provide you with a turn-key, no fail solution. And even if what you’re ultimately trying to do is just express those feeling so that they’re not bottled in, the extent and the depth to which you’re going into can come across that way. It may even be subconscious; you may not intend this but there’s a part of your mind that’s hoping that by expressing those feelings, the other person will be moved by compassion and/or pity to help solve it for you.

I think one of the biggest things you need to do is get back to therapy. It sounds to me like “some” therapy wasn’t enough, especially if you’re still feeling like you have to talk about these emotions to such an extreme degree. Like Luke running off to confront Vader before he finished his training with Yoda, it sounds like you may have stopped therapy before you were ready. If you’re not in a place where you’ve got enough emotional self-regulation to be able to talk about being lonely without going full-tilt boogie, then that’s definitely something that you need to work on with a therapist.

Your friends may want to lend a sympathetic ear and shoulder, but they’re not a trained professional, not equipped to handle it and – importantly – have their own traumas and issues to manage. There’s limits to what they can do. The therapist’s couch, on the other hand, is exactly the place to be having those in-depth, no-holds barred conversations about your loneliness and how much it sucks; they’ve not just opted in, they are there specifically to work on it with you.

I’ve talked before about being in good working order in order to date and it sounds to me like you’ve still got some work to do. Either you’re still struggling with not trauma dumping, or else you’ve pulled back so hard that you can’t express yourself at all. In either case, working with a therapist is precisely how you start making progress – both in terms of how to express yourself to others, but also to resolve the feeling that expressing yourself is taboo because of having done it badly before. Think of it as both healing the wound but also cultivating a skillset that will improve your emotional intelligence and your ability to connect with others.

It’s good that you’ve made progress, but it’s important to not working because of it. I understand wanting to get to it, but like a football player who’s been sidelined by an injury: if you get back on the field before you’re ready, you’re just going to cause more damage. As impatient as you may feel – 13 years is a long goddamn time! – not doing the work is going to mean taking even longer and having to do a lot more work in the process.

Be good to yourself and give yourself permission to heal. Then you’ll be in a place to challenge those self-limiting beliefs and start making a concerted effort to find love.

Good luck.